Over time we change. The importance of snowboarding in our lives waxes and wanes. There are seasons with 100 days and seasons with 10. Friends move home and new faces appear in the lift line. Hair is lost. Knees and backs get weaker. Our constitution gets stronger.

Springhill Winterpark is the closest ski hill to Winnipeg, MB, and home of, among others, Jake Kuzyk, Darrah Reid-McLean, Jody Wachniak and Andrew Geeves. Serviced by two rope-tows and a fixed-grip quad chair, the top of the hill is approximately 853 feet above sea level. Springhill lives on the side of a spillway built to save Winnipeg from flooding. The total vertical drop is unclear, as Google Earth shows much of the hill below water, but the vertical drop is probably about 100 feet. If the rope tow breaks, it takes two minutes to walk up the hill. The parking lot is at the top.

Near Nelson, BC, the summit of Ymir Mountain reaches 7,867 feet above sea level, or 2,625 feet above the parking lot of Whitewater Ski Resort. It takes somewhere between two and five hours to reach the summit. The resort receives almost 40 feet of snowfall a year, which equates to more than a third of the total height of the entirety of Springhill.

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